A mat­ter of time

Hav­ing bought an iPhone 4s in Oc­to­ber 2012, I was per­suaded to switch from Win­dows on the desk­top which I have used at home since 1993. I bought a Mac Mini (Late 2012 model) which promptly had dis­play driver prob­lems and a 13-inch Mac­Book Air (the real rea­son for the switch).

I got on fine with Moun­tain Lion although, hav­ing de­cided not to buy Out­look, I found a few miss­ing fea­tures frus­trat­ing. How­ever the seam­less syn­chro­ni­sa­tion of Mail, Cal­en­dar and other apps rather made up for it. Even­tu­ally the dis­play driver is­sue was fixed. I use trains quite a lot and the abil­ity to en­ter ap­point­ments (train times) to the near­est minute is pos­si­ble in OS X but miss­ing in iOS very frus­trat­ing. It did ap­pear in iOS briefly but Ap­ple must have re­alised that giv­ing in­creased func­tion­al­ity was a mis­take and with­drew it again!

The switch from Moun­tain Lion to Mav­er­icks was trau­matic, and I and many other users had great dif­fi­cul­ties with Mail. I wasted a lot of time on that. The other real an­noy­ance was that a drag and drop fa­cil­ity was re­moved. Up un­til then I could drag and drop an email on to Re­minders to set up a di­ary note. That fa­cil­ity was re­moved - why? I re­ally miss it. Now that I have switched from Mav­er­icks to Yosemite, ‘Re­cent items’ doesn’t up­date – it’s my prin­ci­pal method of call­ing up doc­u­ments. I should add that I use Of­fice 2011 but it has al­ways worked in the past. Any ideas? Bob Horner Christian Hall says: We agree that the in­abil­ity to set pre­cise event times in Cal­en­dar on iOS is awk­ward – it’s un­help­ful to have to set ap­prox­i­mate times when you’re em­bark­ing on a multi-leg jour­ney, for ex­am­ple. Try Fan­tas­ti­cal 2 for iPhone (£2.99 from the App Store), which al­lows event times to be set to spe­cific min­utes. It works on the same cal­en­dar data as Ap­ple’s app, rather than a sep­a­rate data­base, so any de­tails you en­ter into it will still be synced to iCloud and other on­line cal­en­dar ser­vices you’ve set up.

Re­gard­ing the in­abil­ity to cre­ate re­minders from emails in Mav­er­icks, that’s pos­si­ble again in Yosemite. As for doc­u­ments not ap­pear­ing un­der > Re­cent Items, we’ve found dis­cus­sions on­line about other peo­ple hav­ing this prob­lem, in­clud­ing https://dis­cus­sions.ap­ple. com/thread/6623413, in which one per­son has posted a re­sponse they got from Ap­ple about how the Re­cent Items fea­ture works.

As an al­ter­na­tive, we sug­gest cre­at­ing a Smart Folder that finds files that you’ve mod­i­fied in, say, the last seven days, and then drag­ging that into the right-hand part of the Dock to turn it into a Stack. Right-click the Stack and set it to sort its con­tents by the date they were mod­i­fied. An ad­van­tage of this is that your cri­te­ria for the Smart Folder can omit files you don’t care about. Also, it takes one fewer clicks to get at your re­cent doc­u­ments.